


Mending Each Other and Calling It Love

by nostalgicatsea



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, M/M, Minor Injuries, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-15 19:59:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17535257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea
Summary: His hands were busted, the skin raw and torn, when Steve pulled off his gloves. Hitting the heavy bag wasn't his go-to method for chasing calmness or sleep, but Tony had been hellbent on beating his nightmares back, even if he scraped himself bloody while he did it.





	Mending Each Other and Calling It Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashes0909](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashes0909/gifts).



> This went from being easy to write to being hard for some reason and I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but I hope you like it, Ash! Happy new year. Thank you for being such a fantastic MTH co-mod.
> 
> Thank you to [sheron](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron) for helping me when I was stuck and unsure whether the story made any sense.

Thirty hours without sleep and Tony had been about to shake out of his skin. It was as if he had been stretched out, his body taut for hours with stress and unease until he snapped, and he had vibrated, vibrated, vibrated, little more than a blur, moving so fast and with such force that he was going to tremble past the lines of his body, fracturing them, uncontained and near invisible because of the strength and speed of his trembling. He was a buzz in physical form, the sound of it, the sensation of it, the movement—he was an intersection of shifting black strokes scribbled one on top of the other, dark, violent, and loud.  
  
He hadn’t been able to go to sleep, and he had been too jittery to hold any tool properly.  
  
Now, punching the heavy bag and feeling each blow detonate inside of him, defusing every one of his tremors, he felt less like he was going to break free of his body and more like he was collapsing; he was still shivering, but he was weak, all of his bones turned watery.  
  
A hand reached out to hold the bag in place.  
  
Steve came into view.  
  
This close, he still radiated the heat that came with sleep, and there was the faintest shadow of stubble coloring his jaw and neck. He had clearly woken up just moments ago even if he somehow looked put-together at—Tony shot a glance at the clock on the far wall—4:30 in the morning.  
  
“Didn’t expect to see you in the gym this early,” Steve said. “You’re usually in the lab.”  
  
_It’s what you do_ , he left unsaid. _When you can’t sleep. And this is what I do when I can’t._  
  
They were the only ones who stayed up this late or woke up this early this often, but somehow Tony hadn’t thought of that when he headed to the gym.  
  
There was a question hanging off of the end of Steve’s words. Even if he was careful not to probe, he stripped Tony bare.  
  
_Why are you here?_  
  
Tony bared his teeth. His smile was all wrong.  
  
“Thought I’d try it your way this time,” he said. “See what all the fuss is about. Turns out you _can_ punch all your problems away.”  
  
His words had come out without much bite; he wasn’t hiding his discomfort too well. Steve’s expression only confirmed it, heavy and serious as he studied Tony. Tony didn’t know what to do with such undivided attention. He never did. He didn’t know what Steve meant half of the time when he observed him like this.  
  
He was feeble, half-liquid, half-solid; his skin had turned gelatinous, and he pushed through the barrier with ease, spilling out everywhere, spreading thinly across the floor like he exerted himself too much just by talking to Steve.  
  
If Steve didn’t move away, he would be soaked. He stayed put.  
  
“Give me your hands.”  
  
Tony didn’t even have time to react to the request. His brain caught up with him a half-step too slow as Steve grabbed his hands before he finished talking anyway; instinct overrode consciousness as he tried to pull away in surprise, but Steve’s grip was firm as he took off his gloves and tossed them to the floor.  
  
“I knew it,” Steve said, low and disappointed. No, not disappointed. Dismayed. He sounded as if he wished he were wrong, as if he didn’t want to see Tony this way.  
  
As if he cared.  
  
Full stop. Nothing else. Just that. Nothing holier-than-thou, nothing I-expected-more-from-you in his voice.  
  
It knocked Tony off-kilter except it shouldn’t have. Despite his misconceptions of Steve that had carried over from adolescence and their botched first meeting, Steve had turned out to be less uptight and callously judgmental than he had assumed he would be.  
  
He followed Steve’s gaze down.  
  
The backs of his hands were chafed raw, and the skin around his knuckles was bright red where it had torn a little.  
  
_Rocky_ , he thought. It was like he had punched slabs of meat, and their color had rubbed off against his knuckles, leaving them bloody.  
  
“You’re breakin’ the ribs,” he said under his breath with a short laugh.  
  
Steve’s eyebrows bunched together in confusion, but he was so used to Tony making references by now that he let it pass without comment.  
  
“You’re gonna want to clean this. Come on.”  
  
He nodded his head to the locker room.  
  
“I know how to handle a little scrape, Rogers,” Tony replied, but he was more amused than offended by Steve’s motherhenning as he followed him to the door. He did have to tend to his hands anyway. They would be in bad shape otherwise. Already, all the pain that he had blocked while pummeling the bag rushed back now that he was no longer zoned out, and his hands were hot and throbbed long after he stopped moving.  
  
He couldn’t stop the hiss that slipped through between his teeth. Steve didn’t notice, too busy opening a first-aid kit that he had had for some inexplicable reason when he approached Tony at the punching bag.  
  
“When did you even get that?”  
  
He marveled at the tips of Steve’s ears flushing before Steve looked up and then at the discomfort on his face once they were face-to-face again. He had never seen him this uncomfortable before, not even when he cracked a lewd joke just to see how he would react.  
  
“I watched you for a while,” Steve admitted after a pause. “I didn’t want to interrupt you, but it seemed like you’d been at it for a long time and I wasn’t sure if you had wraps on under your gloves.”  
  
“I lost track of time,” Tony said except that wasn’t entirely true. He hadn’t set out with an end time in mind; he was just going to go until he exhausted himself or stopped feeling so jittery.  
  
“Yeah,” Steve said like that was even an answer, but he was trying to say something else and it was as if he didn’t know how or if it would be welcome. Tony heard it, what followed that one word.  
  
_That happens to me too._  
  
He supposed that was why he let Steve examine his hands. They both spent long hours in the lab and gym on bad nights. Some days, he would walk by on the way back up to his floor and see Steve by himself in the large gym, lifting heavier weights than even the strongest man in the world could hold or sprinting at full speed, the way he couldn’t on the streets or at the park.  
  
This was what the Greeks had gone on about. The shackles came off during those nights and uninhibited, with no reason to hold back, Steve was fearsome, a myth come to life.  
  
Tony would stop in his tracks and look his fill, the way he couldn’t any other time, knowing that Steve had been there for a while and that it was because he couldn’t sleep; it took a lot of effort for him to get that drenched with sweat, and he was up before his normal morning hours. He would wonder how his life came to this—knowing all of his teammates’ schedules, even if all of them did their own thing and preferred it that way, like he was a soccer mom with a color-coded calendar in his head—and then he would walk away, leaving Steve at it.  
  
To pummel his hands to pulpy shreds, apparently, enough times that he wasn’t surprised by Tony’s injuries or explanation.  
  
How often did he do that? His injuries would be gone in less than a day; he could push himself harder than Tony could because his body would reset like he was some kind of reverse Fight Club Cinderella.  
  
Steve remained in the bathroom with him as he washed his hands gingerly, clamping his mouth shut so that no sound could escape as the water bit them. He could tell Steve to leave. He knew he would go if he said he had it handled. It was just a bad contusion and scraped skin.  
  
What came out when he shut off the faucet and dried off his hands with the towel that Steve handed him was this: “You gonna patch me up, Doc?”  
  
Steve blinked at him in surprise.  
  
He hadn’t said anything about that, just that Tony needed to clean his hands—but he had hovered awkwardly in the doorway, halfway in and halfway out, decisiveness making way for uncertainty as he realized this was something Tony could do on his own. All Tony could think about when he noticed that was the way Steve’s face fell when he examined his hands and the way Steve’s hands felt around his.  
  
Steve had never been like that with him before.  
  
He held out his hands, feeling like he had fallen apart and pieces of him had flung everywhere.  
  
He had never been like this with Steve before either.  
  
Uncharted territory was dangerous; one wrong move and what they had built, stone upon uneven stone, a structure that was precariously cobbled together but remained intact if left alone, would come tumbling down. They would go back to where they had been at the Helicarrier, so they did their best not to do anything to rock the boat.  
  
But Steve had looked at him, so worried, and maybe if he approached this with caution, he could strengthen what they had, make it more structurally sound. He was an engineer, after all. He couldn’t leave this alone.  
  
Steve took his right hand and held it, saying and doing nothing for a brief moment before he replied. “Okay,” he said quietly.  
  
He took out ointment from the kit, never once letting go of Tony even if it would have been easier or more logical to do so. He squeezed the tube and swiped the lip, getting the salve on his fingers and then shifting his hold so that he cradled Tony’s hand in both of his. Without looking up, he spread it across sore skin and massaged with care, slowing down when Tony flinched.  
  
“I thought you’d be the kind of guy to warm things up before prep,” Tony shot off his mouth because never mind what he had thought before; this was too much too fast, and Steve was going to break him down treating him like this until there was nothing left if he didn’t prevent him from doing so.  
  
He waited for what they built to crash down from his push. Steve stopped his ministrations but didn’t let go—he was only waiting to heat up the ointment some more before continuing to spread it around.  
  
“There. Happy now?” Steve asked, but there was no irritation to his voice or anything really, just the palest shade of fond exasperation. He seemed steadier now, not as hesitant.  
  
“You’re a perfect gentleman.”  
  
He didn’t bother telling Steve that the ointment wasn’t that cold; it was just that his nerves shorted out from overstimulation as the cream touched his sensitive skin.  
  
Steve was careful anyway, rubbing slow circles before he let go and took care of Tony’s other hand. He grabbed the bandages he left on the sink counter, unrolling them and tearing off two long strips, winding them firmly but gently around Tony’s hands.  
  
He took all the pieces he found of Tony scattered everywhere and put them together again, wrapping the bandages around them and around his hands, making sure that the fit was snug enough. It was soothing, the repetitiveness of it, watching the cloth go up and over again, feeling Steve’s hands around his. Tony started to feel more concrete, all his fault lines sealing up, all his nervous energy seeping out of him until he was solid again, until he was himself.  
  
“You’re pretty good at this,” he noted. It was true. Steve knew what he was doing, and he was doing a better job of wrapping the bandages than if he had done it on his own.  
  
“Ma used to do this for me, and I learned by watching. I got good at it during the war.”  
  
“All those back alley scraps came in handy, huh?”  
  
One corner of Steve’s mouth quirked up. “That and some more. You’d be surprised.”  
  
“Are you saying Captain America fights dirty?”  
  
“I’m just saying unconventional methods are surprisingly effective sometimes. There. All done. Tell me if it’s loose enough.”  
  
“I’m going to remember that the next time you disagree with my tactics in the field.” He clenched his hands, reveling in how perfectly tight the bandages felt around them. The pain from the contusions was muffled under them, and he could still move his fingers. “I’m good. Thanks.” He paused before adding, “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”  
  
Steve smiled at him, soft even under the fluorescent bathroom light but not quite happy. Something ached underneath, too muted for Tony to make sense of it. They were still strangers to each other in the end.  
  
“You need your hands to work. Can’t have you busting them up like this.”  
  
He rubbed his thumb across Tony’s knuckles before letting go. He was still smiling and now that he wasn’t about to shake out of his skin, Tony noticed for the first time the shadows crescented under Steve’s eyes.  
  
The tension that had coiled in Steve’s muscles and the tightness around his eyes when he first came into the gym were gone now, but exhaustion had replaced them instead, the cruel kind that wouldn’t let him rest.  
  
Tony could imagine him sitting in the kitchen after he left him, insomnia his only company as he watched the sun rise over the city and faced the long stretch of the day ahead.  
  
He thought of the way that Steve had looked at him when he stopped him from destroying the bag, the way he held his hands in his, so crestfallen over their swollen, bloody, shredded state. He thought of the way that Steve had brushed his torn skin, the calluses and scars that he had collected over the years, with a kind of reverence before applying the ointment.  
  
“You need your hands to work,” he had said, and there was a meaning there that Tony couldn’t interpret but wanted to study up close so he could, one day.  
  
“C’mon. Let me treat you to breakfast. It’s the least I can do.”  
  
There was more he could have added, a tease about him being the prettiest nurse he ever had, something facetious to return everything to the status quo, but that desire to understand what Steve meant stopped him.  
  
He brought up a bandaged hand to wrap around Steve’s arm instead. Steve leaned in, pliant under his tentative touch, and wonder and the beginning of something else bloomed inside of him as Steve let him draw him close, as all of Steve’s fatigued tension fell away under his caress.


End file.
